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15th November 2016

Aaron Burr, sir

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So this happened. 🙂

I, like a good portion of the US, fell in love with Hamilton. I have a small amount of pride that I was one of the early fangirls – when I was in New York City last year, it was about a week before the show went into previews and everybody was talking about it. And then NPR streamed the music when the soundtrack was released – I listened a day or two after that and I was hooked.

“Wait for It” was an instant, soul crushing, soul devouring favorite. I was so sad when the original cast left – alas, I did not listen to my inner, indulgent self and buy tickets last year.

So when Leslie announced a solo album, and then a national tour, and one of the cities was my city. Well.

He opened the show singing Autumn Leaves, which is one of my all time favorite songs, as covered by Eva Cassidy. A couple of Christmas songs, some Nat King Cole, a song from Spring Awakening and a song from Rent (Without You – stunning), and then of course, his three songs from Hamilton. I cried at Dear Theodosia, like I haven’t before. The line “if we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you” hit me harder than it ever has – I sure hope that this is a firm foundation.

His voice was gorgeous, silky smooth and sexy and stunning. We sat 3 rows from the back of the upper balcony so the view was minimal, but his voice…

We stood in line for over an hour to buy his CD and then have him sign it and he hugged and took pictures with everybody. I told him how much his version of Autumn Leaves meant to me and we gushed briefly about Eva Cassidy.

Such a magical night.

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14th November 2016

Plans for writing every day sure are thwarted when an election triggers severe anxiety and panic attacks and insomnia and fear. I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to fill in those days. I’ve tried to be reasonable and then every day comes a reminder of what America has really voted – and this desperate prayer and plea that the safeguards of our nation will really protect us.

I am terrified.

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9th November 2016

devastation

I cannot even process today. I’m numb and angry and despondent and distressed and scared and so very, very sad. I’m sure I’m much like many people across the country who were pouring through exit polls to figure out how this could happen today. And I have no further answers.

My moment of fear that this was really happening came early last night, as Virginia and Ohio remained stubbornly red (Virginia turned blue at the last minute). I watched in horror as Michigan and Wisconsin went red and knew it was over, long before they called it. My friend Lindsay came over and we just stared at our respective phones while PBS droned on in the background, too upset to even cry.

Today wasn’t better. I am fearful of what comes next. The ACA/Obamacare is the most heavy on my mind because it directly affects the care I give and my patient’s health (not to mention that my sister is on it and my parents were planning on retiring in a year or so and using it to bridge them to Medicare) and it is likely to disappear into thin air, but when I think of the list of vulnerable people – and when I read Trump’s 100 days proposal which was so extreme and so hateful and will alienate every single one of our world allies, I start crying again.

I do live in liberal oasis. The freeways tonight are shut down with Trump protestors. But I’ve never felt further away from my country. The pundits tell me that that’s how the rural and suburban America has been feeling and I’m straining to have empathy. But for now, I have so much anger that they were so short-sighted to elect a man with no morals, no experience, no policy, who was racist, sexist, narcissistic, whose supporters feed into that mentality and I was blindsided.

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8th November 2016

i’m going to cry

Oh God.

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7th November 2016

Election Eve

I spent the evening tonight going through the Oregon ballot and circling in with blue pen my choices. Some of them were easy decisions (Hillary Clinton for president was a no-brainer), some of the local measures were much more difficult. Have I mentioned before how much I love living in a liberal city, where the politicians talk about how liberal and progressive they are compared to their opponent? it’s such a refreshing change.

I am nervous about the election tomorrow and the projected maps swinging so severely the last couple of weeks have not helped. I joked early on in the election that if the nightmare that is Donald Trump won the presidency, I’d move to Canada – and I do have good friends there who would sponsor me. It would take some exams and licensing, but I could find employment easily enough and Vancouver is beautiful – I could live there happily. But. I’m also a doctor, and as a doctor, it’s in my ethics and my morals to assist the marginalized and the downtrodden. So it’s all empty talk – I would stay and somehow try to mitigate the disaster. At least until the nuclear fallout from when Trump insults North Korea. I hope it won’t come to that.

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6th November 2016

professional comfort

I held three family conferences tonight (two with the same family). One was drama filled – a very emotional family, with lots of back history, with multiple family members who disagreed with the actions of the decision maker, which ended with the decision maker yelling at the other family members. *sigh* In the end I convinced them that pursuing medical management and not doing surgery was still offering a treatment, but I hate to think how the meeting is going to go in a couple of days if Patient doesn’t improve.

My second and third meetings were even harder, as Patient #2 was somebody who I had cared for a couple of months ago. P2 had come in very very sick at that point and I had had multiple conversations with the family then – but surprisingly P2 had done better than expected and doing well in rehab – and then had recurrence of the extreme neurological injury. The family was obviously in deep shock. It was a long night, with many unanswerable questions and I had to convey to them how close to death P2 was – and how they may not survive until morning. It’s worse having a closer relationship with the family – I had buoyed them through times of uncertainty, and now this.

This is the part of my job that I am good at, and in some ways, it’s what drove me to go into critical care. And it’s also exhausting.

I don’t dream about my patients much anymore. I used to through most of residency and fellowship, near nightmares that would keep me just under the edge of consciousness as I ruminated endlessly about the decisions I made that may or may not have contributed to their condition. Those stopped a year or so as being an attending. It helped having another person who took over after 12 hours, that other pair of eyes as backup, but I also have grown more confident about my decisions. I do chart stalk for the first few days after I rotate off, obsessively following up on how things develop and change, before that peters out. And then the cycle begins again.

I have this coming week off-service. Tomorrow will be my “post-call” day off. I have paperwork to do for the hiring process of our fellow joining in January. I’m applying for a teaching recognition and have to write myself a letter of recommendation for my chair to edit and sign (*whimper*). I’m mentoring a resident, who is struggling so I’m meeting with his program director. I’m creating our lecture curriculum for the next half year. And I’m revising our webpage, as it’s almost time for applications for fellowship again. It’ll be a busy week. And then on Monday, I’m back on service in the ICU with my patients and their families. And it begins again.

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5th November 2016

just random

I’m working nights this weekend. We have six patients on our team, so it was pretty quick rounds tonight. My typing on the desktop computers is somewhat limited by my fingers (it’s not so bad with the laptop because I can tip it just right), so it still took too long to get out of there, but it’s nice having an early night, and an extra hour of sleep tonight. I stayed up way too late last night, because my PA that I worked with is an avid west coast swing dancer, who adores (and has danced with!) Benji Schwimmer much like me, so we went hunting for all of his new and old routines. And now my body is saying that I need more sleep.

I am all the way done with my 2014 and 2015 year summaries! Only 2 years late! Except I can not figure out how to get an album inserted into wordpress, so that it shows the cover picture only, and then when you click on it, it opens the rest of the pictures as a slideshow. I used to use a plugin that was straight forward and did exactly that, but it stopped working with one of the WP updates. Anybody have any ideas of plugins that they like?

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4th November 2016

battered and bruised

Seven weeks ago, I went to a neurocritical care conference across the river from Washington D.C. DC was one of my favorite cities when I was in college/med school – my friend Sam went to law school there and I went out and visited her several times and just fell in love with the city. I hadn’t been back there since she graduated, so I was really excited to get to see the city. They changed the dates of the conference this ear, so I accidentally bought plane tickets for a couple of days before the conference started – which gave me a great excuse to do some touristing.

I took the bus into the city and explored the Capitol Building, which I had avoided my last visits there – I’ve had a pretty profound phobia of tall buildings since I was a kid, which has only improved this last year to my joy and astonishment. So I took a tour of the rotunda and the Old Senate chambers.

After the tour ended, I decided to walk around the grounds a little bit and then meander down towards the Washington Memorial. I walked up behind the Capitol, snapping pictures of what I thought was the Supreme Court Building (spoiler alert – it wasn’t. But the Library of Congress is a beautiful building). And as I was putting my camera away, I missed the curb and wasn’t able to catch myself and fell down hard.

I knew pretty much instantly that I had hurt myself badly. 2 tourists, 1 capitol police officer, 1 capitol doctor and a capitol nurse, another with another couple of capitol law enforcement, 3 firemen and finally 2 EMS personnel later and I found myself having an intimate tour of the George Washington emergency department.

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I lacerated my eyebrow (I was wearing sunglasses that sliced right across), requiring 2 layers of stitches and developed a black eye – I walked around my conference for three days looking like a domestic violence victim. And I fell onto my hand and pretty much instantly wasn’t able to bend it. 2 hours later, it was severely swollen and bruised.

That was 7 weeks ago. And I’m still not able to bend my ring and pinky finger. I saw one of the orthopedic providers a week ago Monday – they think there may be a hairline fracture (radiology didn’t call one and I think it’s just a skin fold).

I finally got to see a hand therapist who hooked me up with a brace to stretch my fingers.

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I’ve been pretty discouraged as I haven’t felt that I’ve gotten much movement, even using this several times a day, but I went back to the therapist today and I have 5-10 degrees more flexion in both my pinky and ring finger so there is hope.

Being injured has been awful. I haven’t been able to write, shaking hands is excruciating, and I’m not able to intubate (not that I did much before – airways are the one thing that still truly give me nightmares). I’m petrified that I’m still going to need surgery or that recovery is going to take me months (and both are still equally likely).

On the plus side, I now know why my ring finger is so short, thanks to the xrays (I’m sure I have had xrays before – I just wasn’t a doctor then and knew what I was looking at): my metacarpal or the bones in your palm is shorter than it’s supposed to be – I actually have a normal size finger, but the “knuckle” is deeper in the palm. My therapist is actually impressed that I was ever able to make a real fist.

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3rd November 2016

A trip across the ocean

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A year ago, a friend and I spent a couple of weeks in Europe (Italy, Austria, Germany – if I ever get my year summary done from last year, I’ll tell you all about it*, which woke up my travel bug that had been lying dormant for years. So when one of my favorite actresses revealed that she was going to be starring in Dreamgirls in the West End and it would be opening around my birthday – well, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. I asked for a couple of weeks off when we were making our schedules back in May and a month or so ago, I bought the plane ticket (for a ridiculously good price, thanks Brexit?).

So far, the plan is to meet up with a friend from Sweden for the weekend and to explore London and we’ll see Amber Riley in Dreamgirls on Monday. We’ll be staying in Notting Hill, in a very cozy and cute little hotel. She’ll leave on Tuesday…

And that’s as far as I’ve planned. I’m hoping to somehow get tickets to Harry Potter and the Curse Child, despite the mixed reviews, but tickets are pretty nonexistent. I’d like to get out of the city and explore the areas nearby, but I’ll be doing it by train and/or bus, so I really need to figure that out this week. I sort of have a hankering to go to Wales. And I’m toying with trying to make this an “Unofficial Jane Austen tour” or a “Unofficial Harry Potter tour” ala my trip to Hawaii and Lost (which was so much fun). I’m half tempted to rent a car – I did that in Germany – but this would be driving on the wrong side of the road with the wrong driver’s side and I’m not sure I’d make it out of England unscathed.

On the other hand, there’s an increasingly likelihood that after next Tuesday, I won’t ever want to return, so maybe getting closer acquaintance with the UK medical system wouldn’t be a bad idea.

For those of you who have been to London or the UK, any advice?

*it’s actually done, I just wanted to add pictures to make it more engaging. And it really needed 2014’s year summary done because they blended together at the end, so I’m working on that one. But it’s harder to remember what I did 2 years ago.

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2nd November 2016

Beautiful

I went to see Beautiful: The Carole King Story tonight, which was really terrific. Julia Knitel was utterly amazing in the lead role (she was the understudy on Broadway). Having season tickets for the Broadway in Portland has been so much fun – except I keep forgetting that I have them. It does have one very big perk: I’ll be able to get tickets to Hamilton next year easy peasy. 🙂

Matt Harding, my favorite traveling dancer, released a new video today which melted my heart. It was just what I needed after this horrible, ugly election season: a reminder that we are all beautifully connected in this world.

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1st November 2016

Must Be November

Ah, November, that time of year when the days become crisp and brief, and elections destroy my faith in society, and little writers put their pen to paper and attempt to make 50,000 words become a story – and I resurrect my blog in a vain attempt to blog every day.

So. Hi.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. Many things have changed. Many haven’t. I’m still in Portland, OR, where the dream of the 90s is alive and thriving. It’s a city that I adore in so many different ways. I’m still at OHSU as an attending in the neuro ICU – I’m already 3 months into my 4th year there. You’re considered a junior attending for 3 years after fellowship, so I’ve somehow passed that threshold – but I still feel new. I’ll probably write more in the next few weeks about my job as I’ve definitely moved beyond the honeymoon there. I live with my sister in the same cute little house (so far my landlord has not made any more threats of selling it). I’m not dating anybody and since I freaked out when my therapist suggested that I “flirt” a little more, I’m actively not dating and overall, doing pretty good with that. I broke up with my religion, a process that has been more agonizing than my laconic summation alludes. I subscribe to 3 different facebook groups for swing dancing and I haven’t gone once. I’m going to England in 3 weeks for a mini just-for-me birthday celebration. I fell two months ago, and I still can’t bend my fingers but I started doing physical therapy now (I’m not hopeful). I now have three nephews and one niece whom I don’t get to see nearly often enough but delight me endlessly. In short, life is full and overall good.

What’s new in your lives?

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